context collapse

I've been thinking about danah boyd's recent post on the current state of Twitter alternatives, along with the context of being a relative Internet Old.

( my early internet participant context: .plans and fingering and retroactively understanding it as a social network )

What struck me most in boyd's analysis is the idea that the slow internal growth of networks was also one of the most significant stabilizing factors. It's paralleled my overall internet experience; many of my LJ friends simply never made the transition over to Dreamwidth, for example, despite whatever logical and emotional reasons to move were provided, illustrated in stories. At the time, we wrote off most of this to "network lock-in;" hanging out on the internet where the largest pure number of "my people" were as a way to optimize ROI on staying in touch with as many people as possible. Which illustrates how the majority of us ended up on Facebook, and slowly, the rich sharing we enjoyed on earlier networks atrophied, bowdlerized into pablum for audiences that now included people with even less of an understanding of the norms of the Internet and its communities that came before. >_>

And then of course, how you found your friends on social media in the 2010s was by uploading your contact lists. Trying to find my friends on 2023 social media like Bluesky and Mastodon has involved third parties that, to the average person, feel like their functionality and respect for data privacy is just as opaque as the more convenient if dangerous method of uploading a contact list.

Among my friends that remain active here on Dreamwidth, it seems like it's been primarily the geeks and the fen, both communities with at least a baseline commonality of norms not true of the broader Internet, long-accustomed to needing to move internet homes every so often, whether seeking novelty or security, and bringing their people along with, most of whom were used to coping with some level of inconvenience and inaccessibility.

But on a more personal level, it makes my recent archival project of centralizing and preserving my own broader internet archives on Dreamwidth feel like the ultimate "context collapse." For the me of 20 years ago, I posted on Planworld to keep in touch with primarily college friends, and I posted to LiveJournal to keep in touch with my online friends, most of whom at that time I'd met through X-Files fandom, or through volunteering for LiveJournal Support. Noting the differences in how I talked about my life; who knew what of me at the time. As the years passed, I built up my post-grad friends circles both in Boston and online, some of whom overlapped in fandom or geekdom, but many of whom didn't. But LiveJournal (and fandom) had gotten mainstream ~enough~, and my circles melded enough, that I grew into feeling comfortable writing for this blended audience, all of whom I counted as friends.

But for newer friends whom I might want to share older posts with, the context feels odd. Like, to give a recent example, trying to explain to the newer Planworld members currently in their early 20s that I was among the first of my college friends to date somebody I'd met on the Internet, even kind of? That almost nobody was on Match.com, that Tinder et al didn't exist? While at the same time, many of my online friends had been in relationships that started on the internet years prior to geebee_x dragging me and a law school friend of hers into an AIM chatroom one night in October 2001 to “secretly yet blatantly” set us up (🔒). But also, that most of the people with whom I was sharing these musings back then were people I had ongoing pre-existing relationships with, whether that was years in the same classrooms and clubs or years in the same chatrooms and mailing lists; that even in bringing new friends into the fold, my networks were mostly growing pretty slowly with specific contexts intact?

I feel a similar awkward butterfly-shedding-its-chrysalis around opening up here again, too - I've been away for so long, and I know I haven't kept up with many of you even elsewhere in recent years. But it still feels like part of how I want to be on the internet; be the change you want to see, be a person talking with other people in an otherwise transactional, influencer-capitalist society.

And I'm only up to summer 2003*! I wonder how I'm going to feel once I really start pulling in tweet threads and Facebook updates and Instagram pictures that stopped getting automatically backed up on Flickr and here.

• Granted, summer 2003 and the people I met because of it were far more pivotal to my life than I could recognize at the time I was living it!